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...helped create the postwar military-industrial-university complex. But the onetime professor at M.I.T.--where he built a massive, gear-driven analog computer called the differential analyzer--was also a prophet. In 1945, dismayed by the wartime info overload, he proposed a desktop machine, the "memex," that would display text and pictures (from a microfilm library) at the press of a button. Presciently, Bush envisioned users of his proto-PC following trails of knowledge along storable hypertext "links," much like today's Web surfers...
After the war, he returned to the I.A.S. and became obsessed with computing. Von Neumann's vision for the machines went beyond the rote arithmetic tasks for which they were originally designed. In his idealized computer, the same memory units that held data items, such as numbers or text, also held the step-by-step instructions that would allow the machine to be programmed to perform any task. Von Neumann persuaded the I.A.S.'s somewhat skeptical board of trustees to allocate $100,000--quite a sum in 1945--to build the MANIAC, the first in a series of early...
...between, there is some tough sledding. Wittgenstein draws a distinction between what can be said, using words, and what can only be shown, and this raises the inevitable question: Does the Tractatus, as a text, say things that can't be said? Maybe. The next-to-last proposition is a famous shocker: "6.54. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these...
...cobbled together a relatively easy-to-learn coding system--HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language)--that has come to be the lingua franca of the Web; it's the way Web-content creators put those little colored, underlined links in their text, add images and so on. He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or url (universal resource locator). And he hacked a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol...
...down. When the intended audience is a tight group of friends, the plan file is characterized by cryptic in-jokes, humorous anecdotes and such. In other cases, the author knows he or she is being stalked by a particular person (usually some jilted romantic flame), and tailors the text accordingly. These plan files are addressed to a mysterious "you," and contain accounts of the exciting/depressing life the author is leading without said person...